Allen Tomoki Nakagawa

You have been Daniel Reyes for one minute, and already you know his ear. The cauliflower thickness of it against the pillow-cold air of a Las Vegas morning, the way his thumb keeps finding it. You stand in his kitchen with his coffee going cold and his keys in his fist, and you can feel that nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. His shoulders work. His knees don't complain. He is a body that asks you for nothing, and in a minute you have already used up everything it has to say. You are standing in a stranger's quiet house before the day has started, and you want, badly, to be somebody who hasn't been opened yet. The page is still on the phone. The wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then you are sitting down, and your forearms are on your knees.

The bench is wood, and it is narrower than it looks. Your breath is going in and out through your teeth, and your heart is slowing from a number you did not choose. A rack stands over you. There is a bar loaded with plates, and a window to your right gone gold with a sun that has barely cleared the wall. A water bottle sweats on the rubber by your shoe. Your left leg is bouncing. You did not tell it to. It has been bouncing all your life.

The shirt comes first. The gray cotton clings damp across your shoulder blades, and it is his: a morning arrives with it, the closet door, the sleeves, a woman asleep in the dark behind him whose name sits just out of reach and warms him anyway. He pulled this on without turning on the light. He always does. He's the man who lets her sleep.

The ring comes next. Your right thumb finds the band on your left hand and turns it, and the turning opens a church: a hard pew, a candle smell, a younger man in a rented suit shaking so badly the priest smiled. Two small voices after that, a hallway, a night he carried one of them asleep against this same chest. The feeling is huge and plain and has nothing to do with you.

The watch is not on your wrist, but the pale band of it is, and with that comes the glass office, the long table, forty people looking at him for the answer. He is good at it. He has never once felt good at it. Under the table his leg bounced the whole time.

Sweat slides down your jaw, and you wipe it with a palm on a smooth, freshly shaved cheek. It sets off a different flash: an old girlfriend, a parked car, rain, a sentence he never finished saying. He has not thought of her in months and he thinks of her now, with no guilt, only a small ache he keeps in a drawer. Your hands know how to chalk themselves. They know the knurling. They want the bar.

Beneath all of it the body speaks honestly. Forty-two years in the hips, a little stiffness in the lower back, thighs warm and strong, lungs wide. There is no drink in him and no wanting for one. There is a long habit of getting up before everyone and being useful.

You stand. Your hands go to the bar, two inches wider than his hands have gone all year, and the grip feels like a different life. You grind the reps out slow. Your face does none of what a last rep does. Then you rack it, and you look down at his hands, and the ring catches the window.

You turn them over. They are steady. You lift your eyes.

"Hello, Allen," you say, in his low voice, and it is kind, and it is the kindest thing you will do to him.

You do not know how long he lasts. Four minutes, or four years. The wanting is asleep in you now, and you can feel it turn over.